LAS VEGAS — Manny Pacquiao continued his improbable cruise upstream Saturday night, sailing blithely against all known laws of weight and age.

He gets older, he gets better. He gets bigger, thrusting himself against accomplished boxers who live at those weights, he gets better.
No, not just better. Quicker, more powerful, more absorbent. He was great against Oscar De La Hoya, greater against Ricky Hatton, greater still against Miguel Cotto here. This is not supposed to happen and, indeed, hardly has ever happened. Not in the sport that takes the most merciless toll at all.
Pacquiao? He isn’t even stopping at the booth.
Referee Kenny Bayless stopped it, 55 seconds into the 12th and final round, with the proud and befuddled Cotto looking distorted and swollen, as if we were watching him in a circus mirror.
Pacquiao knocked down Cotto in the second and third rounds and, after the sixth round or so, had turned the ballyhooed occasion into a savage workout against an all-too-human heavy bag.
In doing so, Pacquiao basically took his sport to the endgame. There is only one matchup that really matters now, and it is Pacquiao against the undefeated Floyd Mayweather Jr., a fight that would overflow with so much genius, emotion and good-guy-bad-guy melodrama that it’s hard to remember anything that would rival it.
Much difficult horse-trading must happen before Pacman-Floyd is made, but Freddie Roach, Pacquiao’s trainer, made it indisputably clear: “I want Mayweather.” And Ross Greenburg, chairman of HBO, said Saturday night that Richard Schaefer of Golden Boy Promotions had told him the negotiations will begin this week.
And the money is the only reason anybody would want Pacquiao. Against the best fighter on his lifetime schedule, the Filipino raised his level to provinces unseen.
All three judges gave Cotto the first round, a feel-out process. Cotto also won the 10th round on two cards. That was it for him.
And yet he started so promisingly. It will be forgotten that Cotto did hit Pacquiao about as often as he had planned to and even backed him up against the ropes. But Pacquiao took those punches without expression and, more often than not, turned them into boomerangs. Cotto’s defensive reputation crumbled against Pacquiao’s knack of ducking in and firing punches from platforms rarely seen.
“The angles make a difference. I didn’t know from where the punches come, and I didn’t protect myself from the punches,” Cotto said. “I fought everybody, you know? Manny is one of the best boxers we have, all time.”
The first knockout was a clubbing right hook that Cotto clearly never saw. In the third, Cotto was actually on the verge of winning the round when Pacquiao suddenly jumped in from nowhere and popped him on the side of the head, and Cotto’s eyes rolled back as he fell again.
Cotto seemed to stabilize a bit in the fifth when he rocked Pacquiao with a left uppercut, but it had the effect of a leaf falling on a school bus. Pacquiao hammered Cotto with a left to the right side of the head, and from then on it was target practice—against one of the most sophisticated and successful boxers in the world. No one would have argued, before this night, that Cotto was one of the five best in the business. The remarkable thing is that he probably still is.
“I get carried away a lot, but I will go on record, and I really believe that pacquiao is the best fighter I’ve ever seen, including Ali and Ray Leonard and Marvin Hagler,” promoter Bob Arum said, and for once there was no eye-rolling in the audience.
Pacquiao, for his part, has become immune to the pre-fight doubts.
“I kept hearing that he’s bigger than me and stronger than me. That’s why I wanted to take the fight toe-to-toe, and go against his power,” Pacquiao said.
“Early in the fight Manny was laying on the ropes too much, but later he was able to get his rhythm,” Roach said. “I was worried because Cotto came on and fought very smart, made the adjustments. Once Manny used his movement and his rhythm, it was too much for him. He had too much speed.”
And he always does. What makes Pacquiao special is that he can get into your face, and he can move out of your range, and then get back in your face, too quickly for your senses to process. Oscar De La Hoya said it was like “fighting 12 fighters at once,” and Pacquiao has now improved his defense and his chin — and just how does one do that? — that he now transcends strategy.
“Manny has done a great job of selling you on the feeling he’s small,” said Nazim Richardson, Shane Mosley’s trainer, Saturday morning. “There’s nothing small about him.”
Not when he keeps looking bigger every day.